Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Science, Free Speech, and the Courts

By Alan
Caruba

The
public, after decades of global warming advocacy, now called “climate
change”, has begun to conclude that claims of a massive warming trend were
dubious and that real climate change is the natural response of the planet to forces
well beyond any impact of the human race.

The fact
is that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for some 17 years based on lower
rates of solar radiation as the Sun undergoes one of its natural cycles, a
reduction in the number of sunspots or magnetic storms on its surface.

The May 5th
edition of the National Review devotes its cover story to “The Case Against
Michael Mann: The Hockey Stick and Free Speech” by Charles C.W. Cooke because
the creator of the “hockey stick” graph purporting a massive warming is suing
the magazine, commentator Mark Steyn, along with the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, and Rand Simberg. In his suit, filed in the D.C. Superior Court,
Mann asserts that “in making the defamatory statement” they acted
intentionally, maliciously, willfully, and with the intent to injure Dr. Mann,
or to benefit (National Review) and Steyn.”

Mann is
asserting a “narrow form of libel that American law prohibits” said Cooke. “As
a seminal Supreme Court case, New York
Times v. Sullivan, outlined in 1964, using the law of libel, to drag
journalists into court for expressing their sincere views on matters of major
public importance is entirely inconsistent with our ‘national commitment to
principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide
open.’”

Mann’s
feelings are hurt and he believes that any criticism of the questionable
science he applied to the creation of his now-famous global warming graph is
libel. I believe the court will conclude that using the charge of libel to
silence his critics is wrong. That’s what makes the case important, in
particular for a basic principle of science, and in general for the public
understanding that global warming and/or climate change depends on vigorous
debate.

Science
depends on being able to reproduce the results of an assertion by other
scientists. Suffice to say that Mann’s graph has been extensively disputed and
found lacking in the methods used to produce it.

As Cooke
reports, the graph “purports to depict global temperature trends between the
years A.D. 1000 and 2000” and takes its name from “a mostly flat line of
temperature data from the year 1000 until about 1900 (the handled of the hockey
stick), followed by a sharp uptick over the 20th century (the
blade).” The graph was published in the 2001 report of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Since then the IPCC has been
retreating from its vehement claim that global warming posed a major threat to
life on Earth.

In 2009,
the leak of many emails between members of the University of East Anglia’s Climate
Research Center and others engaging in the global warming claims revealed that
“Mann and his colleagues have processed their data in a way that makes global
warming appear more severe than the evidence suggests on its own.” Most damning
was Mann’s use of tree ring data and the way other data was ignored in order to
make his claims about global warming appear to be valid. “The leaked emails
suggest that some members of the IPCC were well aware of these
inconsistencies—and even may have sought to conceal them,” notes Cooke.

Aside from
the dubious science cited, the issue before the court is whether publicly
questioning Mann can or should be deemed libelous. If it concludes that it is,
then the most fundamental principle of science will be destroyed and the courts
will fill up with similar cases whose purpose would be to censor and silence
the debate that is the life blood of science.

Mann has
claimed to have been a Nobel Prize laureate, but Cooke notes that the Nobel
Committee “explicitly said that he is not.” He has claimed that the National
Academy of Sciences and that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research
Unit investigations into his conduct and his work “have fully vindicated him
“when they in fact have done no such thing.”

Worldwide,
people have been subjected to the greatest hoax of the modern era and 17 years
of cooling demonstrates that carbon dioxide, a “greenhouse gas” plays no role
in heating the Earth. All of the claims about global warming are demonstrably
wrong, along with all of the computer models and other “proof” inaccurate to
the point of being purposefully deceptive.

At the
heart of the case against the National Review is whether a scientist can
silence his critics and one can only hope for the sake of science, free speech, freedom of the press, and the
truth that Mann loses.

The decisions made by the Supreme Court on Obamacare and EPA regulations tell us in no uncertain terms that if this case eventually goes to that top judicial body, sound and honest logic cannot be expected.

The Steyn case and the case against Tim Ball in Canada will be looked at as seminal cases in years to come. Especially the Ball case! Mann was going to have to reveal his hockey stick metadata, which he has hidden for years, and may be what he calls his dirty laundry. Mann thought a couple of SLAPP suits would scare everyone into silence. Now he’s in trouble. In February, John O’Sullivan wrote that poor Mikey now faces bankruptcy as his ‘courtroom climate capers collapse’. In Canada he has lost because he refused to turn over his hockey stick metadata as the courts demanded, and is now facing “massive counterclaims in excess of ten million dollars”, where may be forced to turn over his records anyway. Lawsuits are like riding a tiger. You just can’t get off and say; I was just kidding!

But this gets even bigger because Ball has also defeated “Professor Andrew Weaver, a “climate scientist” at the University of Victoria, BC, Deputy Leader of the Green Party of British Columbia, and a member of the British Columbia Legislative Assembly, and the IPCC’s lead climate modeler, who also sued Ball. His suit also failed for the same reason Mann’s failed. Failure to turn over records as required by the court! In just these two Canadian suits Ball destroyed the credibility of Mann, Weaver, the Hockey Stick Graph, and the IPCC’s modeling projections.

The story doesn’t get smaller as it extends out in time. It would appear the “real mastermind” behind all this was David Suzuki and his deep pocketed environmental organization, which may become less deep in the near future.

Here is the insanity of it all. All of those who have lost are still strangely influential. What I would like to know is - why this isn’t being pursued as a RICO case – since this must be considered a criminal conspiracy. I agree with O’Sullivan that the real truth will never come out unless this is pursued as a criminal investigation.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.